Row upon row of jars filled with fish and frogs and cabinets packed with skins of birds or insects on pins can only begin to tell the stories of the millions of species preserved in Ohio State’s Museum of Biological Diversity.

This museum is not what most people might think of – with the cool dinosaur exhibits for both children and adults to enjoy. The extensive collection of the museum is used for research that aids in the preservation of species and the health of mankind.

“This is a very important biological research museum that many other universities look to for information,” said John Wenzel, director of the museum.

Many divisions make up the museum, such as acarology (mites and ticks), herbarium, entomology (insects) and zoology.

The museum even has a lab that stores sounds of many species of animals.

The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics is one of the largest in the world, said Chris Caprette, a graduate assistant of the lab.

Jill Soho, the lab’s curator, said most of the sounds come from wild birds, but the insects, amphibians and mammals also make noise.

“The first sound in the lab was made by a blue jay in 1948,” Soho said.

The largest collection in the zoology department is the fish with about 1.4 million species, said Marc Kibbey, collection manager of the fish division of the museum.

“Many of our specimens come from investigators doing research on a certain species or particular area, but we also get donations from private citizens, anglers, naturalists, grad students and professors here at the museum,” Kibbey said.

Kibbey said the main mission of the department is to aid in the identification and classification of species of fish.

“In a geographic range, some animal may be found far enough away from the area of its species to be named a sub-species, or – vice-versa – we might invalidate the title of a sub-species,” Kibbey said.

Kibbey said most of the specimens come from the western United States, where the best fish fossils are found.

The largest species of fish stored in the museum are three or four feet long and kept in stainless steel tanks.

The museum contains one of the largest collections of freshwater clams and oysters in the world, said Tom Watters, curator of mollusks. There are half a million collected on an online database.

Many of the specimens are the shells of the animals, but some are collected live and preserved in alcohol.

“Live preservation is a hot topic for a lot of scientific groups because there are now many studies being conducted using the DNA of the animals,” Watters said. “There are few collections of alcohol-preserved mollusks.”

Most of the bivalves come from North America, but the collection spans the globe.

“Many of the species we have are federally endangered or extinct. Ohio has been extremely proactive in protecting these animals,” Watters said. “They are very sensitive to pollutants; the canary in a coal mine, you might say.”

Most of the higher invertebrates collection – such as reptiles, birds and mammals – is historical, meaning the specimens come from donations by researchers in the past. Some of the specimens are from other universities and museums including the Smithsonian, said John Condit, the adjunct an assistant professor of the higher vertebrate department.

The reptiles and amphibians are stored in alcohol, and the birds and mammals are kept in cabinets as skins. They are organized systematically by species.

The collection includes a number of extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet.

“Some of these species were extinct since the 1900s. We have specimens in this museum that no one else can ever obtain again,” Wenzel said.

The museum’s coverage of acarology is one of the most extensive in the world.

“We have a crash course over the summer that brings in students from all over the world,” Wenzel said. “If you learned acarology, you either learned it in Columbus or from someone who learned it in Columbus.”

The entomology department also maintains a global collection of three million specimens, Wenzel said.

Most of the research is done on smaller insects since there is already so much known on the larger ones, Wenzel said.

The herbarium in the museum has some of the best representations of southern South American plants and a widespread collection of North American plant life as well, Wenzel said.

The collection goes as far back as the 1830s with the first specimens taken from the Franklin County area.

“Because we have older collections of plants in an area, we can document the change in flora in that area,” said John Freudenstein, director of the herbarium. “Without the specimen we wouldn’t be able to tell what the plant-life was like in the past.”

The departments all had collections spread over the university until they were combined in the museum 10 years ago, Wenzel said.